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While federal law has required states to identify and intervene in struggling schools for years, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) promised a reset, allowing states to reimagine their school rating and identification systems and giving districts and schools more control over improvement strategies. There is reason to be optimistic. But the authority in ESSA does not guarantee better results; rather, it gives education leaders more flexibility and creativity to solve one of the nation’s most intractable problems—improving (deplorably low) outcomes for underserved students. We do not know yet how many states will seize this opportunity to demand bold action from districts, but a handful of states already are leading the way.

As a professor of human development in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park, Dr. Kathryn Wentzel researches the nature of teacher-student relationships and how these relationships predict young adolescents’ goal pursuit, prosocial behavior, and academic performance.

What is it about stories that make them such a powerful tool of communication? How can educators weave storytelling into instruction to help students make deeper and more meaningful connections to academic content?

Today’s Digest explores how storytelling can be used to promote deeper learning in the classroom. It also paints a picture of competency-based learning across the country, and offers some advice for kick-starting personalized learning in your school or district.

Last month, as I attended the EdSurge Fusion 2018 conference, I immersed myself in the idea of education transformation. Sitting in that hotel ballroom, I was surrounded by the most cutting-edge educators—those district leaders, principals, and teachers who are leading the way to provide students with genuine twenty-first-century learning experiences.

Recently, Mike Petrilli wrote about the Alliance for Excellent Education’s analysis of state ESSA plans in which we found that twelve states do not ensure subgroups are universally included in school ratings. While acknowledging that this could be an issue, Mike, with an assist from Aaron Churchill, used Ohio data to make the case that we were (mostly) crying wolf: Including subgroups in school ratings doesn’t matter because subgroup performance is almost always reflected in schoolwide averages, at least when using value-added measures. Specifically, Mike and Aaron showed how school-level growth data for “all students” in Ohio tends to be strongly correlated with school-level growth data for “Black” and “low-income” students. Very few schools would have received both an “A” or “B” grade for “all students” growth and a “D” or ”F” for the specific subgroup’s growth. Mike concluded that we “should stop fretting about this particular aspect of state accountability systems” and move on.

We have a short flash for you today with an update on a new resource with information on racial inequities in schools, as well as the Department of Education’s process to implement the recently reauthorized Carl D Perkins Career and Technical Education Act.

It’s tempting to jump right to advocating for all students to have deeper learning experiences. But as our friends at the Buck Institute for Education remind us, there are other basic needs that must be met for students to learn deeply.

This digest highlights what else students need to learn deeply. It also shares how to measure social-emotional learning, why adolescence is a prime time for deeper learning skills, and a call for workshop proposals for Deeper Learning 2019.

March for Our Lives. DREAMers. Black Lives Matter. Young people are lifting up their voices and demanding a seat at the table to discuss issues of immigration, gun violence, and inequality that permeate their lives. These are problems that students carry from their homes to their schools each day.

As an educator or school leader, student activism may lead to difficult questions. Should you support your students when they stand up for change? What if your beliefs differ from theirs, or you have trouble relating to their experiences? If you want to support them, what’s an appropriate way to do so?

What skills do students need to be considered “life ready?” For Virginia high school graduates, they may sound familiar: “critical and creative thinkers, excellent communicators and collaborative and civic-minded citizens.” So what steps can states take to give their students opportunities for deeper learning?

This digest features stories of deeper learning in Virginia, the importance of collaboration in personalized learning, some key lessons in competency-based education and an upcoming event in Tennessee.